Tepco Says Most Power Restored at Fukushima Plant’s Fuel Pools

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- Power was mostly restored at
Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station after an outage
caused a stoppage of water pumps used to cool spent uranium fuel
at the tsunami-damaged plant.

No spikes in radiation levels were recorded near the plant
during the failure that started shortly before 7 p.m. yesterday,
the government said. The outage did not affect cooling systems
for the plant’s reactors, the Nuclear Regulation Authority said
in an e-mailed statement.

There was “absolutely no change” reported in radiation,
Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said at a media
briefing today. Without power to pump cooling water through the
pools, the rods could have heated up over days and released
radiation.

Three reactors melted down at the Dai-Ichi plant after the
earthquake and tsunami on March 11 two years ago, making it the
world’s worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. About 160,000
people were forced to evacuate and a 20-kilometer no-go zone was
set up because of radiation fallout.

Pumps at four cooling pools lost power, with electricity
for the one in reactor building No. 1 reconnected to the main
power supply this afternoon, Masayuki Ono, a general manager at
plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., said at a press
conference this evening. Pumps in the No. 4 building were now
connected to a diesel generator and will be linked to the main
system at 8 p.m., Ono said. The No. 4 pool holds more than 1,500
spent fuel rods, according to the company.

‘Necessary Speed’

“We are attacking this with all necessary speed,” Ono
said. The loss of electricity may have been caused by a power
distribution box and is being investigated, he said at an
earlier briefing.

The pool in the No. 3 building is also due to resume
cooling operations by 8 p.m. A separate shared cooling pool is
scheduled to resume by 8 a.m. tomorrow, Ono said. Power was
restored earlier today at a purification system in the plant for
removing radiated particles from water, he said.

Spent fuel pools are typically 40 feet deep and built in
reactor buildings. They’re made of reinforced concrete several
feet thick and steel sheeting to contain radiation and hold
water to cool rods after they have been used in a reactor,
according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Tokyo Electric and Japan’s government announced in December
2011 that the Fukushima reactors reached a state known as cold
shutdown nine months after the March 11 earthquake and ensuing
tsunami caused the biggest release of radiation since the
Chernobyl accident in 1986.

Japan’s previous government approved phasing out nuclear
power by the end of the 2030s, a policy favored by the largest
percentage of citizens in a government poll in August.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose Liberal
Democratic Party won a landslide majority in December, has said
that policy needs to be reconsidered to provide the energy
needed to help revive the world’s third-biggest economy.